CONCRETE FIGURES

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Having decided to decorate their personal plot, many decide to acquire garden sculptures. Having bought a couple of interesting specimens, several gnomes, a hedgehog and a hare, the desire to do something with his own hands wakes up. For these purposes, it is not necessary to buy expensive molds. You can make figures using improvised tools. We suggest that you begin your creative activity with fungi, which everyone can do.
So you will need:
• Sand;
• Cement;
• Glue for laying Ceresit tiles, Moment or other brands;
• Rubber ball (you can take the old one or buy the cheapest);
• A plastic 2-liter bottle for soda or beer.
• Metal rod or fittings.

We cut the rubber ball into two parts. Next, take a bucket and pour sand into it. We make a notch in the sand and set half of the rubber ball in it. If you just put the ball on the ground, then there will be an ugly crease-dent in the crown of the future mushroom cap.

Now it's time to make the concrete mix. To do this, you need to take sand, cement and glue for laying tiles or glue for reinforcing or gluing polystyrene boards. Glue is necessary in order for the mixture to be more ductile and durable, and subsequently not crack. The proportion is: 1/2 sand, 1/4 glue and 1/4 cement. When you add water, you should not pour too much, because the consistency should not be too liquid.

We fill the half of the rubber ball to the brim with the resulting concrete mixture and level it. We take a plastic bottle cut from two edges and deepen it in the center by one centimeter into the filled half of the ball. We insert the reinforcement in such a way that it connects the bottle (mushroom leg) and the half of the ball (mushroom cap). It's time to fill the cylinder with the concrete mixture from the plastic bottle.
After all that has been done, let the product dry.

The rubber ball can be removed the next day so that the mushroom cap dries faster and the mushroom leg must be in the plastic cylinder for at least three days. After this period it is necessary to take a construction knife and cut the plastic cylinder, freeing the mushroom leg. Now it is necessary that the freed leg of the fungus, being in the open state, dry well.

A little explanation is needed here. When the ball is removed, the mushroom hat will already keep in good shape, but will be damp and supple for making some adjustments. Using a spatula, it is recommended to slightly round the edges of the mushroom cap. If insignificant voids on the surface have formed in the mushroom hat or leg, then they should be filled with a solution. After the fungus dries well and petrifies, it must be opened with a primer. The primer will protect the fungus from various weather phenomena, and in addition it will be an excellent basis for further staining.

Various materials can be used as paints: spray paint, oil paint, acrylic paint, etc. If you want your mushroom to shine in the sun, then you can open it after staining with a layer of varnish. The mushroom can be painted in various ways. If you make a red hat and white circles on it, then you will get a very interesting, fabulous fly agaric. If the mushroom hat is brown, then a mushroom will turn out. If you want something unusual, you can gilt the mushroom's hat with a spray can of gold paint. And if you liked the idea with a fly agaric, you can paint the mushroom's hat red, and buy white pebbles in the shop for creativity and stick them with glue.

Mushrooms look when they are represented by a group. It is advisable that the mushrooms have a different size, then this will doubly give them realism. For mushrooms of different sizes, balls of different diameters and different displacement plastic bottles are needed.